Have Search, Will Tweet: Twitter Gets a Facelift

A Few Changes Any User Will Love

Twitter today is selectively rolling out a few redesign tweaks (why should Facebook Pages get all the redesign buzz?). There are a few Twitter changes any of its users will love:

Twitter adds a search box.

A search box: Yes, you can search for anything -- not just people. What took Twitter years to do this? Heaven knows (or, Biz knows). But the days of opening up separate browser tabs for Twitter and Twitter Search may be coming to an end (and yes, it's very uncool to use a browser to tweet rather than TweetDeck or the iPhone -- sorry).

Trends: View the top trends, hashtags or no hashtags, from the top navigation bar. You probably know what #watchmen refers to, but you can now easily dig deeper to find out why the heck people are talking about Toronto (reason: it's 175 years old; in other words, it's been waiting 75 freaking years for a shout-out from Willard Scott. Come on, Willard, show him some Smuckers love!).

New features round out search results.

Featured users: Alongside search results and trends, there are featured users. This will help the rich get richer. In some early tests, the followers of featured users range from 9,000 to well over 100,000. As if @bbcclick, @mashable and @jdickerson needed more followers. These users are manually selected, accompanied by shortened bios. Conceivably, this could be a future revenue stream for Twitter, with users paying to promote themselves, but there's no sign of that now.